Survivin’ and Thrivin’ in the Show Pen

Archive for the ‘NRHA Futurity’ Category

As a writer, I subscribe to a lot of different writing-related newsletters. One of them is the Merriam-Webster’s
Word of the Day. This was today’s word:

\fyoo-TOOR-uh-tee\

Meaning

*1 : time to come : future
2 : the quality or state of being future
3 plural : future events or prospects

Example Sentence

The motivational speaker exhorted us to change the way we live today, rather than looking always toward some vague distant futurity.

Did you know?

“Futurity” is a forward-looking word with a literate past. Its first known use is in Shakespeare’s Othello, when the downtrodden Cassio, mystified about why Othello has turned against him, beseeches Desdemona to tell him whether his “offense be of such mortal kind / That nor my service past, nor present sorrows, / Nor purpos’d merit in futurity / Can ransom me into his love again.” The term was also used by Benjamin Franklin (“I must one of these days go back to see him . . . but futurities are uncertain”), and Sir Walter Scott wrote of events “still in the womb of futurity” (that is, events that hadn’t happened yet). Today, “futurity” often refers to a race, usually for two-year-old horses, in which the competitors are entered at birth or before, or to a race or competition for which entries are made well in advance of the event.

What I find interesting is that in the reining industry we use the term futurity to mean “reining event for three year olds” and that is the definition we’ve used to guide us through changes in the industry … changes to how we nominate and pay for our horses to compete in futurities at an elite level.

I just wanted to highlight my personal favorite run from the 2008 NRHA Futurity. You can call me biased because I know the rider and the owner of the horse, and I can accept that… but when looking for an example of a perfect run, you can’t do much better than Cody Sapergia’s run on The Great Tag, which garnered them Reserve Champion in the 2008 Open Futurity.

The winner of the Open Futurity was Tim McQuay on Shining N Sassy. You can see their run below, also fan-tab-u-lous!